Pat Rice of Arsenal and Liverpool's Phil Thompson will sit in their Highbury dugouts this afternoon, ready and willing to do the bidding of their respective Gallic masters Arsene Wenger and Gerard Houllier. No one who has spent any time with Rice or Thompson, however, would describe either man as a French poodle.

Both retain the bark and bite which has earned them roles requiring them to do much more than just pass their medals around the dressing-room. To fans and the English players in the two teams, Rice and Thompson are symbols of continuing heritages at their clubs; a sign that when the French managers were brought in, it did not mean consigning their previous histories to the dustbin. Both men were inspiring skippers at their clubs, epitomising, pre-foreign invasion, the bulldog spirit that blossomed behind the doors of Highbury and Anfield.

There is, though, an enormous disparity between the coaching credentials of the two men and their routes to the role of assistant manager. Rice (50), was brought up in one of the terraced houses outside Highbury and after signing as an apprentice in 1966, has left his second home only once, a four-year spell learning his trade under Graham Taylor at Watford.

Thompson, employed briefly as youth team coach at Liverpool before being sacked by Graeme Souness in 1992, spent the intervening years before his appointment as Houllier's number two as a commentator for radio and Sky TV.

Thompson was scathing in his criticism of the Liverpool Spice Boys and, according to friends, cannot come to terms with the inflated salaries, egos and movie-star lifestyles of the modern players.

Thus it is no surprise that Thompson (44) defines his role as "kicking a few people up the backside." He adds: "I've been brought in to instil a bit of passion and I can be very passionate and aggressive. On my first day, one player came up to me and said `does this mean we are going to get rollickings again?' Maybe that's what has been missing and if that helps, maybe my appointment will gather momentum."

Rice, who has been learning the art of man-management since the day he hung up his boots, has come to understand that it is the force of your argument, rather than your voice, which is most likely to win over players.

He says: "You can never stop learning in this game. But whatever happens on the pitch, whatever goes wrong, you will never see me standing in the dressingroom telling them about how things were when I was a player. We live in the present. Nor do I worry about what the players earn. They deserve every penny."

Thompson, you suspect, after years fuelling his resentment as a critic while powerless to do anything positive, might easily fall into the trap which proved the downfall of Alan Ball at Manchester City: living by the law of Truemanism (as in Fred) where every sentence begins with the words "Now in my day . . ."

Wenger's decision to make Rice his number two now looks to have been the ultimate act of shrewdness by a manager who analyses every move. The appointment of Thompson, though he may yet prove successful, appeared to be an act of vagueness, if not desperation, by Houllier, who apparently asked the club to find a right hand man who is "Liverpool through and through."

Retired Anfield scout Tom Saunders, who grew up in Bill Shankly's boot room and was horrified, in recent visits to the training ground, by what he considered to be an easy-going regime, unhesitatingly nominated Thompson as the man to whip the team into shape.

If he is wise, Thompson will swiftly abandon any preconceptions that he can transplant the spirit of his era on to the modern one and results in the last few weeks suggest his methods might be working. But one of the reasons given for his sacking by Souness was that he was too hard on the youngsters. Millionaire first-teamers, he will discover, have much thinner skin.

Thompson and Rice naturally specialise in the art of defending on the training ground. But it is doubtful whether Houllier, in the manner of Wenger, puts a restraining arm on Thompson if he rollocks the back four for their peripatetic ways. Rice says: "Arsene lets me talk to the defenders but he will pull me up if I try to curb their attacking instincts. He will tap me on the shoulder and say `let them think for themselves'."

You get the feeling that under Thompson's beratings, Liverpool's players have little time to think. But he would do well to learn, like Rice, that he, not them, must adjust to a different era.